For years, Sports Illustrated has collected and featured bizarre, zany or just plain disappointing weekly reports from the world of sports entitled, “This week’s sign the apocalypse is upon us.” I haven’t read Sports Illustrated recently, but I fondly recall the unique section of the magazine and consciously apply its title in my mind to […]

When our 10-year-old son James came home from school in January and told us he had been invited to compete in the Nature Bowl, I didn’t know what to make of the opportunity at first. I knew the Nature Bowl was a science competition, but I didn’t know what the experience would entail. I initially […]

As a columnist routinely in search of new ideas, it’s much easier to cover a negative topic than a positive one. There is always something to complain about, and it takes far less energy to find something that ticks you off and vent on it than it does searching out a positive story. One of […]

El Dorado Hills is one of those classic American suburbs that have many people involved in all kinds of activities, but it’s not always readily apparent that hearts are plugged into these community activities. What I mean by that is we can all become involved in something for more self-serving reasons, whether it is for […]

Want to become unpopular in a hurry with your middle school children? Tell them they can’t have a mobile phone when many of their friends are running around with the devices. It’s a struggle my wife and I are managing at home these days. We’re sticking to our guns, and the boys, ages 12 and […]

In 2009 an accident left Dwayne Nystrom a quadriplegic. Today, the 39-year-old Cameron Park man is playing quadriplegic rugby with an eye on a national ranking for his team and a dream of competing for the United States someday in the Paralympic Games. Nystrom first tried quad rugby a year after his accident when he […]

A few weeks ago when our local evenings regularly dropped into the freezing zone, a friend of ours who lives with his family in the Serrano neighborhood of El Dorado Hills made a startling discovery in his back yard. It was dark outside, but still relatively early in the evening, when our friend — let’s […]